Monks part of '24 Hours in Cyberspace': Jesuit photographer also joins effort to document Internet

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 9, 1996 by Pamela Schaeffer

Merton, of course, was a Trappist monk, providing another link between Doll and Simmonds. Although the monks in Berryville, Va., will not meet Doll, they will be as involved as he in the Feb. 8 photography quest. Like Clifford, the monks have found that great blessings can come in electronic packages. A seven-station computer network and a home page on the Internet (http://www.presstar.com/fruitcak.html), combined with fax machines, have given them a way to take some,25,000 orders for their popular fruitcakes without the nuisance of ringing phones. That's important for monks who observe a strict vow of silence. Even more, computers have given the monks a way to ensure economic stability.

Holy Cross is among about eight monasteries around the country that have signed on with Electronic Scriptorium, a company in Leesburg, Va., that Contracts with cloistered monks and nuns to do data-entry work. A large part of the consists of creating electronic catalogs of library collections, a natural for Simmonds, who holds a library degree from Columbia University in New York an the special collections staff at the New York Public Library before becoming a monk. It's also a natural for monasteries in general, linking them to their medieval past, where copying and preserving documents was often the primary work of monks.

Holy Cross monks are writing captions for an electronic picture library for the New York Daily News. Just two of the 26 monks at the abbey are working on the project, said Simmonds, who is the abbey,s prior. But when cyberspace photographer Nick Kelsh takes pictures on Feb. 8, it won't be of monks sitting in front of computers. That would be visually boring. Instead, Kelsh will be photographing "a bake," said Simmonds -- some 450 fruitcakes in the making.

Ingredients for a bake, to be repeated many times in the coming months include 20 pounds of butter, 84 pounds of flour, 44 pounds of eggs, 68 pounds of sugar, and 750 pounds of fruit and nuts -- 1,000 pounds of ingredients in all, not counting spices, sherry and brandy.

While the fruitcake business is the economic mainstay at Holy Cross, the electronic tasks provide financial security for the future, Simmonds said. "Every monastic community or anyone involved with business knows it's not wise to have all your eggs in one basket," he said. "Fruitcakes were a very helpful step in the development of our own economic life, which was based for decades on bread." In the 1970s, the monks bread business declined alarmingly, as large companies began making better breads. Fruitcakes were a next step, he said.

"We hope not to find ourselves again in a position where we haven't taken a preliminary next step," Simmonds said. "So our association with the scriptorium gives us the possibility of work that can,take us forward."

Meanwhile, the monks are careful that virtual reality doesn't interfere with efforts to contact Reality, through prayer and silence.

Ed Leonard, a former executive with a Computer company, started the Electronic Scriptorium after meeting the monks at Berryville through his environmental activism in the Blue Ridge Mountains. While he sensed a great opportunity for a highly educated and flexible work force, he also realized that deadline pressures would be ill-suited to monastic life.